Read on to learn more about the role pets have played in Seattle’s urban history!

Credit: Christy Avery

Dogs are rarely seen reading urban history – the bright-eyed fellow pictured above notwithstanding – but dogs have played a vital role in urban history. Over the last century, their numbers have increased dramatically. One rough estimate is that their population has increased from five thousand in 1905 to 150,000 today. The working dog is not absent from the city today: from guide dogs, to guard dogs, to dogs in police K9 units. Yet, the role of pure companion, with no expectation of work, predominates. Many of us couldn’t imagine urban life without our furry friends.

Credit: MOHAI, SHS12890

A century ago, dogs were friends to be sure, but also as guard-dogs, hunting dogs, ratters, and workers at other tasks. Often, the role of work and play blended. For instance, the dogs in the front row of this 1898 image of McVay Mill, in Ballard, may have blended roles as mascots, pets, and watchdogs. One newspaper ad from 1921 captured the mixing of roles: “Police Dog puppies. The most intelligent and faithful companion, excellent as watchdog and ideal as pet for children.”

Credit: MOHAI, 1974.5923.46; photo by McBride Anderson

Other dogs had a role as pure companions a century ago. Here for example, Priscilla Grace Treat cuddles her dog, around 1920. Seattleites had deep connections of love and friendship with their dogs. For instance, one family wrote of their German shepherd in 1935, “He is treated as a member of the family and with a laugh takes the rocking chair, when he feels like sitting in it.”

Credit: Frederick L. Brown

Cats generally have better things to do than read urban history, making this curious girl from the Central District hard to explain. But they too have been woven into the city’s history, since its founding. Cats’ urban role has perhaps undergone an even greater transformation than that of dogs. Before the widespread use of cat litter in the 1940s, it was considered unsanitary for them to spend much time indoors.

Credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Hester 10587; photograph by Wilhelm Hester

A century ago, most cats had a working role killing mice and rats, in private homes and in businesses. They had an important role in any business storing, selling, or transporting food that might attract mice and rats. They hunted rodents on docks and ships and, many believed, afforded sailors good luck, making them honored members of ships’ crews, as their presence in numerous crew portraits attests. Here, the crew of the British vessel Penthesilea sits on the deck in a Puget Sound port in 1904. A crew member in the back row holds a cat.

Credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, Warner 3107 (detail)

Although cats typically had working roles in the early twentieth century, people also enjoyed them for other reasons. At the Warner residence in Seattle around 1900, a man and woman smile and watch a kitten.

Credit: Frederick L. Brown

Backyard chickens have become popular in recent years. Some refer to the pleasures of seeing chicken curiosity and their lively exploration of backyards (and even the occasional historical monograph) as “Chicken Television.” In the late 1990s, the Tilth Alliance found soaring interest in its backyard chicken classes. For some city-dwellers, these increasingly popular creatures are “pets with benefits” – the benefits being eggs.

Credit: University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections, KHL195; photo by Ambrose Kiehl

A century ago, backyard chickens were not primarily pets. They were a vital source of eggs, and also meat, to urban dwellers. Yet the daily act of feeding chickens allowed human connection, and children especially, often saw them as pets. Here Miriam Kiehl holds a chicken for a portrait at Fort Lawton in 1899.

Yet, as The City Is More Than Human explores, chickens illustrate the paradoxes of urban pet-keeping. Backyard chickens have remained in the city, and yet increasing numbers of chickens live in large-scale operations far from the city. This battery for laying hens in Woodinville in 1935 was one step along that journey to greater and greater industrialization.

For every one backyard urban chicken today, there are thousands of chickens in faraway industrial-scale farms that provide meat and eggs to Seattleites. Some of the chickens, indeed, provide the meat that feeds urban cats and dogs. That moment of great connection and caring, when we feed our cats and dogs, is also a moment where we generally are ignorant of the lives of those faraway creatures. So, as we think about the wonderful place of urban pets in our lives, let’s also remember those faraway animals that are integral to urban life and urban pet-keeping.

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Frederick L. Brown holds a PhD in history from the University of Washington and works on a contract basis as a historian for the National Park Service.

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive.

Through in-depth interviews with neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists, Fitzgerald examines what it means to do scientific research in the ambiguous terrain of autism research, a field marked by shifting horizons of uncertainty and ambivalence. He draws out how autism scientists talk and feel their way through their research, demonstrating its profoundly affective character, and expanding our understanding of what is at stake in the new brain sciences.

Today we speak with the author about his book, published this summer.

What inspired you to get into your field?

Des Fitzgerald: I’ve always been pretty comfortable describing myself as a sociologist. I actually entered university (in Cork, Ireland, where I’m from) to study literature, but fairly quickly realized that I had zero interest in spending my life as a literary scholar. I dropped out for a few years and came back to study sociology—and have been pretty happy ever since. It’s a cliché, but I like that we are empirical, and actually in-touch with things in the world and the issues of the day, but we’re also literary and philosophical too. I like that in sociology departments (in Britain at least) you’ll still find people who are basically continental philosophers, as well as people who are super-positivist big-data number crunchers. I think our field often suffers in policy and public debate for being neither one thing nor the other—not having the cultural weight of the humanities on the one hand, or the perceived instrumental value of the natural sciences on the other—but this neither-one-thing-nor-the-otherness is what I like most about sociology. Some days it’s the only thing I like about sociology. Within the discipline, I’ve always been interested in how sociology grapples with the material world: I wrote my undergrad thesis about architecture, and was actually barely an inch away from becoming a museums studies person as a master’s student. Thinking about how the body gets torqued in the contemporary life sciences, and especially in the neurosciences, has been really fruitful for me on this score. I can imagine myself working on other things, but I’m going to mine this seam for another couple of years yet, I think.

Describe the process of writing the book.

DF: Honestly, it might annoy some people, but my memories of writing this book are all highly pleasurable. I don’t at all mean to diminish anyone’s struggles, and I know lots of people find writing hard and painful in various ways, but I also feel that sometimes too much of the discourse around academic writing, and especially PhD writing, is about the alleviation of pain and anxiety. Maybe we don’t talk enough about the savoring of pleasure, and about how lovely it can be, actually, to spend time writing a thesis or a book (again, I acknowledge: that pleasure is of course entangled in the multiple kinds of privilege that I embody, but it’s pleasure all the same). The year or so in which I wrote the first draft of this book were probably the happiest twelve months of my life – if I could whistle (which I can’t), I would have whistled going into the office every morning. The rewrite, much of which took place over one winter at Cardiff Central Library, was also pretty good. In terms of process, I essentially collected data over a twelve-month period, and then really sat down and wrote the book, fairly methodically, chapter by chapter, over the course of another year. The actual core argument—centered on the image of tracing—emerged halfway through, and appeared only fitfully in the first version. It was only when I went back to rewrite the manuscript some years later, having done a lot of other things in-between that I was really able to articulate what I wanted to say about neuroscience, and how badly it had been construed in and by the social sciences. The gap between dissertation and book was important, I think—I needed a few years to make sense of what the dissertation had been trying to say.

Who do you see as the audience for this book?

DF: Anyone who’s interested in understanding what contemporary neurosciences are actually like, how they work, and want to hear the voices of some of the people who make them up. I’m not shy about saying that there is a serious attempt to make a contribution to some strands of contemporary social and cultural theory—studies of affect, of course, but also wider attentions to materiality, especially as that materiality gets crystallized in the objects of the life sciences—but I’ve worked hard to write it in a fairly approachable and easygoing style, and to cleave pretty closely to what the people in the interviews are actually saying.

What would you have been if not an academic?

DF: I actually asked some colleagues this a couple of years ago, and it turns out that many academics nurture surprisingly well elaborated alternative-career fantasies. My own is artisanal café and bicycle-repair shop owner—which is a fantasy that I like to maintain despite not knowing very much about coffee, or anything at all about bicycle repair. More seriously, I would say that I have never been the kind of person who can only imagine a fulfilling intellectual life in and through the university, or while being acknowledged as that still fairly recent historical figure, “an academic.” Not to be po-faced about it, but I think the question of how to craft intellectual and scholarly futures in the absence of the university is going to be a big question in the coming years: “what might you yet be” is probably a better way to put this question than “what would you have been?” And of course many people at the sharp end of the academic job market have already started to craft responses to this issue. I definitely don’t invest all of my intellectual hope in academia.

What are you reading right now?

DF: The truthful answer to this, of course, is “lots of Twitter with special attention to the quality and frequency of my own mentions.” But I do manage to read other stuff too. I’m currently coauthoring a new book on urban neuroscience and am trying to think about the ways in which the study of the city and the study of the body might have gotten into one another historically—so I’ve been reading a lot of late-nineteenth-century urban studies literature. My favorites so far are W. E. B. Du Bois’s brilliant and pioneering study, The Philadelphia Negro (I’ve also enjoyed Aldon Morris’s excellent recent reclaiming of Du Bois’s legacy for sociology, The Scholar Denied, which all sociologists should read) and Seebohm Rowntrees’s surprisingly, and deeply, weird monograph from 1901, Poverty: A Study of Town Life. Charles Booth’s more famous Life and Labour volumes turn out to be more of a drag than I anticipated, and Booth himself not especially pleasant company as an author or editor (although obviously I still like the maps). For vaguely work-related pleasure-reading, I’ve been reading Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression and McKenzie Wark’s General Intellects. For other kinds of pleasure, someone recently recommended Octavia Butler to me at a conference and I am getting really into her Dawn series at the moment.

What do you think is the book’s most important contribution?

DF: I think what I have been trying to say, with various coauthors in the last couple of years (in particular, with Felicity Callard in the book and papers we wrote together on collaboration, and with Nikolas Rose and Ilina Singh in the papers we wrote on urban sociology) is that we have not at all understood the life sciences in general, and the neurosciences in particular, in sociology, medical anthropology, and science and technology studies. Too many of my colleagues still think neuroscience is either a crudely reductive would-be science of everything, or, even worse, some kind of running-dog of neoliberalism working hard to individualize and cerebralize social life. But it seems to me, and Tracing Autism is where I think I make this case most forcefully, that actually, when you get outside the journals, and the press releases, and the media pronouncements, neuroscience is a much more modest, ambiguous, complex, interesting, emotional, and (in the best sense of this word) weird practice than we have really understood. Recognizing the complex ways in which social, political, and neurological lives are caught up in one another, and how much of social life is lived in and through the body and brain, and vice versa, there are loads of ways in which social scientists, STS scholars, and life scientists, can work together to get some more compelling analytical and methodological grip on the present. I’ve said versions of that—with colleagues—elsewhere, but I think the central contribution of Tracing Autism is to show, in detail, and with lots of good data, just what kind of practice cognitive neuroscience is, and can be, when it encounters a human phenomenon as complex and fraught as the autism spectrum.

What is the biggest misunderstanding people have about your field and what you do?

DF: I think a lot of people, looking at the sociology (or anthropology) of science and medicine, or at science and technology studies, from the outside, still see them as working through some kind of 1990s-style social-constructionist culture war, or at least as practices for bringing the natural sciences down to size in some way. I will say that is not always a misconception—and frankly I despair a bit when I see colleagues, in sociology especially, rehashing fairly tired tropes about big bad biology. But by and large this is not where things are at: it’s true that some people are never going to leave the twentieth century, and good luck to them, but the most creative and interesting working happening in these fields, right now, is work that is trying to inhabit, make sense of, and create new paths through, the multiple intersections of these two domains. I’m not sure that’s always as visible to people on the outside as maybe it should be.

Des Fitzgerald is lecturer in sociology at Cardiff University. He is the coauthor of Rethinking Interdisciplinarity across the Social Sciences and Neurosciences.

“The book not only informed our film’s research for the Duwamish, but so well described the tribe’s modern day struggle for recognition that it inspired our focus to the broader federal policies that eventually drew our attention to the Chinook story, and stories like it across the nation. Those histories and struggles are so well-documented in these books and our film wouldn’t have made sense without them and the appearance of the authors within the documentary.”

We are thrilled that Seattle Theatre Group (STG) is hosting a free screening of “Promised Land” at the Neptune Theatre on July 6 and bringing the Duwamish Tribe and Chinook Nation’s struggle to the people of Seattle. Both tribes will be on hand before and after the show at tables in the lobby, and at a post-film panel discussion, to talk to the community. University Book Store will also have a table at the event to sell our books. Doors open at 7 p.m., the Duwamish and Chinook start drumming at 7:30 p.m., and the film starts at 8 p.m. We hope you can join us!

In celebration of the screening event later this week, we feature the following excerpt from the new preface to the second edition of Native Seattle:

SaveBeyond the federally recognized tribes, Seattle’s urban Indigenous community has also become increasingly visible in the decade since Native Seattle was first published. Performers like Red Eagle Soaring, a dance and theatre ensemble made up of Indigenous youth of many backgrounds, took stages across the city. Artists such as Seminole-Choctaw filmmaker Tracy Rector, whose “You Are On Indigenous Land” photography installation, made up of intimate portraits of members of her community taken by her and her colleagues, received praise from the local press. And in 2015, Blackfeet legal advocate and jurist Debora Juarez successfully campaigned for the city council, representing the city’s northernmost district. A far cry from the place of Indigenous people in the city’s consciousness in earlier eras—symbols of a vanishing race or threats to urban order—Indigenous women and men have become important players in the city’s cultural and political landscape.

Indigenous institutions are also on the rise. Daybreak Star cultural center, located in Discovery Park and founded by the activists who took over Fort Lawton in 1970, remains a crucial resource for many people in Seattle’s Indigenous community, including hosting the annual Seafair Days powwow. At the University of Washington, meanwhile, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ (Intellectual House) opened in 2015, after years of organizing by activists both within and outside the UW community. It serves as a center for Indigenous concerns on campus and is already a much sought-after venue for academic and other events. But wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ’s place-story goes deeper than that. According to Tseshaht Nuu-chah-nulth professor Charlotte Coté, “when you walk into Intellectual House, you really do feel the spirits of their ancestors. This is not just a building.” Designed by Cherokee-Choctaw architect Johnpaul Jones in a style reminiscent of the longhouses that once graced the nearby Duwamish community of Little Canoe Channel, wǝɫǝbʔaltxʷ was described by organizing committee member Denny Hurtado of the Skokomish Tribe as “a home where we can share our culture with the non-natives, and build bridges amongst us.” And down at the Pike Place Market, Nooksack artist and entrepreneur Louie Gong has opened the famed market’s first Indigenous-owned business, Eighth Generation. Together, all of these new additions to Seattle’s Indigenous landscape speak to the ongoing work of the city’s Indigenous community to be seen, to create, and to flourish.

Seattle’s Indian-inflected self-image has also continued to grow and change. In 2008, for example, the city unveiled a new trail circling Lake Union that was named after Cheshiahud, the Duwamish man who had once lived on the lake’s shoreline. Nearby, at the Museum of History and Industry’s new location, the 1950s diorama of the Denny Party no longer serves as the starting point of the city’s history; instead, a gallery curated under the guidance of local tribal members reminds visitors that they, as was Denny, are on Indigenous land. In 2014, meanwhile, the city council ruled unanimously to rename Columbus Day as Indigenous Peoples Day, making Seattle one of the first cities to reorient itself in relation to a long-honored and much-excoriated commemoration of colonialism’s ultimate bête noir. That same year, the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl, and even that victory was framed in part through Indigenous imagery: the Burke Museum displayed a Kwakwaka’wakw eagle transformation mask thought to the be the inspiration for the football team’s logo, while during the team’s victory parade, running back Marshawn Lynch received a drum from Lummi tribal member John Scott. Lynch’s beating of the drum received worldwide attention and once again highlighted Indigenous presence in the city. Finally, in the years to come, the city’s much-debated redevelopment of the waterfront will feature the work of Puyallup artist Qwalsius (Shaun Peterson), whose Coast Salish–style works will push back against the North Coast imagery so associated with Seattle’s public image.

In the midst of all this, with the deepest place-story of all, the Duwamish remain. Despite being denied federal recognition yet again in 2015—a decision the Department of the Interior described as “final”—the tribe’s members continue to fight for legal and cultural recognition. In the wake of the 2015 ruling, more than fifty Duwamish people and allies protested at the West Seattle home of Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, and in one newspaper account of the decision, tribal chairwoman Cecile Hansen stated firmly, “we’re not invisible.” This is true. As they had during the 2001 sesquicentennial of the Denny Party’s landing at Alki Beach, the Duwamish continue to make their presence known in very public ways while attending to their own cultural revival. Former tribal councilmember James Rasmussen, for example, is one of the leaders of the Duwamish Cleanup Coalition, whose goal is to continue the work of remediating the Superfund site that is Seattle’s only river, while the tribe’s dance group T’ilibshudub (Dancing Feet) often performs around the city and elsewhere. Most notably, the Duwamish opened their long-planned longhouse and cultural center in 2009, just across West Marginal Way from the site of their ancient town of Crying Face. The tribe has also been involved in documenting its own history, perhaps most importantly through the work of University of Victoria graduate student and Duwamish descendant Julia Allain who collected stories of many of the tribe’s leading families. These activities and others show that federal recognition, as a colonial legal framework, does not necessarily determine Indigeneity: as Indigenous people around the world have asserted, they can exist regardless of someone else’s rules.

None of the events described above have happened without significant Indigenous activism, as has been always been the case throughout Seattle’s history, in which Native people have had to struggle to claim a place in the city and to combat the stereotypical images of the doomed, vanished Indian. In doing, so, they have exhibited what Ojibwe journalist and scholar Gerald Vizenor has called “survivance.” Survivance, a neologism that connotes both survival and resistance, speaks to something beyond simple persistence:

Theories of survivance are elusive, obscure, and imprecise by definition . . . but survivance is invariably true in native practice and company. The nature of survivance is unmistakable in native stories . . . and is clearly visible in narrative resistance and personal attributes, such as the native humanistic tease, vital irony, spirit, cast of mind, and moral courage.

The character of survivance creates a sense of native presence over absence, nihility, and victimry. Survivance is a continuation of stories, not a mere reaction . . . survivance is greater than the right of a survivable name.

Nothing captures this notion of survivance more than the 2015 protests against oil giant Shell, whose enormous drilling rig was anchored for a time in Elliott Bay. Hundreds of “kayaktivists” took to the water to speak out against drilling and block aquatic access to the rig, but this was more than the usual Seattle environmentalist action. There, among the brightly colored plastic watercraft, were tribal canoes, leading the charge in defense of the earth. Such is survivance; such is the truth that Seattle’s Indigenous history is far from over.